Bharti Airtel restructures to focus on digital assets

Bharti Airtel restructures to focus on digital assets

Under the new structure, Airtel Digital will fold into Bharti Airtel.

Bharti Airtel

NEW DELHI: Telecom giant Bharti Airtel has tweaked its corporate structure in a bid to sharpen its focus on digital opportunities while enabling it to unlock value. 

Under the new structure, Airtel Digital will merge with the listed entity Bharti Airtel, and it will now house all digital assets of the company including Wynk Music, Airtel X stream, Airtel Thanks, Mitra Payments platform used by a million retailers, Airtel Ads, Airtel IQ, Airtel Secure, Airtel Cloud and all future digital products and services. 

The move is expected to be instrumental in attracting strategic and financial investors as well as scale up the digital business. With this, the company has set its sights on ramping up digital business revenue to more than Rs 1,000 crore from Rs 100 crore now.

From now, the telecom business of the company will be housed in a new entity, Airtel Limited – a wholly-owned subsidiary of Bharti Airtel Ltd. Bharti Telemedia, the arm operating DTH services of the company, will be housed alongside Airtel Limited. 

On the other hand, Airtel Payments Bank will remain a separate entity under Bharti Airtel. The conglomerate’s infrastructure businesses that include Nxtra and Indus Towers will continue to remain separate entities as they are now. 

"The new structure sets the exciting future course for Bharti Airtel and provides focus on the four distinct businesses – digital, India, international and infrastructure, each, in a razor-sharp way,” said Bharti Airtel chairman Sunil Mittal in a statement. “We believe this will provide agility, expertise, and operational rigour to serve our customers brilliantly while providing flexibility to unlock value for our shareholders. This structure will serve us well over the coming years and is a win-win for all stakeholders."

The statement from Airtel revealed that the company is intending to "eventually fold the DTH business into Airtel Limited to move towards the NDCP vision of converged services to customers."